Out of the Comfort Zone, a devotional thought

In Acts 9:43 we’re told that while Peter was on an itinerant ministry tour, he stayed for “many days” in Joppa with a tanner (i.e. someone who tanned hides and prepared them into leather), a tanner named Simon. This is just an offhand line, but it’s really interesting to me, because a tanner, of course, handled animal carcasses (which is where the hides came from), and according to Jewish Law at the time, anyone who handled a dead body was unclean; and so culturally, and traditionally, being a tanner was considered an unclean profession. We know from 10:14 that Peter is quite particular about Jewish cleanliness laws (nothing unclean has ever passed his lips, he says), and yet here we see him lodging at the home of an unclean tanner, of all people. God, of course, is about to explode his whole notion of cleanliness and uncleanness, by sending (gasp) some non-Jewish Gentiles to him, requesting an audience, but in a way, this has already begun when he came under Simon the Tanner’s roof. God, it turns out, does not share our concerns when it comes to keeping ourselves safely in our comfort zones, is my point. As uncomfortable as it may have made Peter to be surrounded by so much “ritual uncleanness” (according to Jewish tradition), this is precisely where serving God has brought him, his own hang ups about human defined comfort zones be damned. Where might we find ourselves serving God, if we shared the same indifference about our comfort zones, I wonder?